[Newspoetry] advert

[Brandy Watts]

She wasn't born after the war, well, the Terrorist War; she functioned 
sometimes gleefully while it was operating.  She gave an askance spit 
at the shoes of the reporters as she quickly walked by; smirking 
pleasantly to herself and for them to see.  She pitied their remiss 
while despising their insistance on the truth.  That would be the first 
word to ostrasize.  She sat in a chair with her head resting against 
the chair in front of her; she was leaning over her papers writing a 
reponse to her economic system.  It had recently gone bankrupt and now 
investors were taking over the reporting end of the reporting 
industry.  Jobs were scarce so everyone was acting as reporters to 
compete in the truth industry, wanting their truth to make it as part 
of the truth and desperate for a distraction from the truthless 
economic system failure.  She printed a text of temporary word meanings 
that she handed to reporters while winking at their forlorn vehement 
faces.  The other paper she assembled and gave away was a flawlessly 
organized mass of responses.  She was almost insignificant to it other 
than that she meticulously collated it and orchestrated it's parts into 
the most sought after paper in the city.  It had become that in the 
midst of the economic system declaring bankruptcy.  This gave her an 
odd mood.  She was apprehensive of trends.  It was a responsepaper.  
Most read it for their need of news and need to think.  It was a snub 
at all the scrambling reporters maneuvering viciously against each 
other.  The media and the stock market had merged and become the media 
stock market.  Investors bid on the stocks of reports which were bought 
and sold and speculated about.  The paper was mostly contrived of 
laypeople's thoughts in response to the peculiar society and their need 
to converse as a means to make news.  Most people were now on the 
wire.  Associated Press had resigned as an institution and in it's 
place was a computer system that stored and distributed news 
internationally.  The computer system was not owned and was impossible 
to rigg.  Only a few computer specialists were needed to maintain it.  
She was methodical about everything she did.  She was strategic with 
each of her interests and each of her desires.  When she was five she 
had felt uneasy not understanding how the economic system worked.  At 
her place the wire came in on fourteen different lines, twelve in 
languages she was fluent, two in languages she wasn't; which she read 
anyway.  The computer system needed a certain amount of responses to 
continue.  Fearful it might stop, people frantically and impecabley 
wrote responses to what was wired; which then was rewired back out.  
The paper was for those without access to or with a distaste for 
computers.  Though, most would take one for coffee table and traffic 
reading.  Everything had become amuck in the society and the paper 
seemed to be a straightener, relation generator, to people's wits.  She 
took the celery from her Bloody Mary and plopped it into her Martini.  
Neither had alcohol.  No one drank alcohol anymore.  It was for 
computers only.  Electricity was no longer condusive to computers.   
Before her was a glass plate with olives with pimentos in them and a 
pickle.  It was crispy, the pickle that is.  The olives she ate in 
between bites of the pickle.  She was also intermittently biting her 
nails.  She kept thinking that he had been looking at her just 
blankly.  The printer was clean.  She looked once more then shut it.  
She swallowed and realized she'd sipped the wrong drink.  That one came 
second.  She hopped in the tub and read the stocks, then a novel, then 
the stocks again, then another paper.  She put a floaty underneath her 
and fell asleep in the water with unfortunately all the papers and the 
book.  She slept until seventeen minutes after the sun could be seen 
from the printer.